I look around. I can sense bodies around me, breathing, hearts pumping, minds churning. Two stand in close proximity. One of them is warded by a standard-issue self-protection device—that’ll be Andy—the unwarded one is Dr. Wills. The third, on the far side of a partition wall, must be the mortuary attendant. Far more interesting to me are the other bodies, stacked floor to ceiling in a neat grid against one wall. They’re not sleeping. They’re empty, indeed, more than empty: they’re filled with a peculiar kind of vacuum that seems to tug at my attention. There are no feeders of the night nearby, for which I am deeply grateful; nor am I about to call them. None of these bodies are suddenly going to fill with un-life and start banging at the doors, desperate to fill their ravening maws with the taint of humanity. There are no souls present save those of the living. All is as it should be.

But. But.

I turn my attention to the body Dr. Wills identified, and peer at it, and realize that there’s something wrong here. I’m not sure what there is about it that feels abnormal at first, so I compare it with the husks in the drawers to either side of it. Ah. That. The adjacent bodies . . . they’d make good hosts. But this one might as well be made of ash and cardboard. It’s not that it’s unappetizing to that part of me that partakes of the Eater’s nature, so much as that it’s inedible: the necromantic equivalent of shit, fully digested matter containing no residual nutrients. Something or someone got here first.

I open my eyes. “This bod—sorry, Sara Siad’s body. Was this one of the ones you examined by MRI?”

Dr. Wills nods. “We’re not risking a dissection on possible prion sources these days, but we have an older scanner that we use for teaching and lab work on non-living samples.”

“Right.”

“What did you notice?” Andy asks.

“She’s been eaten.” I shiver, and not from the cold of the refrigeration system. “Her brain is so thoroughly chewed-up that you couldn’t make a zombie out of her: if I summoned a feeder here and now I couldn’t convince it to take up occupation. It’s as if she’s already been consumed. I’d guess the brain stem is mostly intact, but the cerebral cortex is like old lace.”

Dr. Wills’s expression is peculiarly intent. “K syndrome never gets that far,” she says. “The patients usually die first. Whatever happened—you’re right about her brain structure—happened very fast, and very thoroughly.”

“Well then. We have needle-stick injuries. And we have something that eats neural networks. Presumably a relative of the feeders in the night, but different: more voracious, faster. If they haven’t been injecting some crazy new street drug—”

Then it hits me.